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None of
the tribes affected by the Presidential Order were consulted. The areas
deleted from the original reservation were rich in minerals.
On
April 19, 1879 and March 6, 1880, two tracts of land where the present
day City of Wenatchee lies, north to the Canadian border between the
crest of the Cascades and the Okanogan River, were established by another
Presidential Executive Order for the Chief Moses tribes consisting of
the Columbia, Chelan, Entiat and Wenatchi.
Three years
later, on July 7, 1883, Chief Moses and his people agreed to either
move to the Colville Indian Reservation or accept an allotment of 640
acres for the head of each family.
Some tribal
families took the allotment of 640 acres and remained in their ancestral
homelands along the Columbia River and at majestic Lake Chelan outside
the established boundaries of the reservation. |
Peter Dan in Regalia
on Horse |
Cheif
Joseph |
In 1885, Chief Moses,
who had moved to the Colville Indian Reservation, invited Chief Joseph
and his tribe of Nez Perce, to live on the reservation. Chief Joseph
and his people were never allowed to return to their former homeland
in the Oregon Territory. He died at Nespelem, Washington in 4001904.
Many descendants of his band reside on the Colville Indian Reservation
today and still belong to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
Twenty years after
the Colville Indian Reservation was moved to its present location, the
north half of the reservation was ceded to the United States by an act
of Congress (27 Stat. 62). At that time 660 Colville Indians were allotted
51,653 acres located in the ceded area.
In that same year,
the United States negotiated an agreement with our tribal forefathers
for the purchase of the unallotted acreage located in the north half
and paid them $1.5 million dollars for 1.5 million acres, priced at
$1.00 an acre.
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The Colville
tribal leaders of 1892 were able to reserve the right for members of
the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation to hunt and fish
on the former north half of the reservation for time immemorial.
Later,
a Presidential Proclamation on October 10, 1900, opened the south half
of the Colville Indian Reservation, totaling 1,449,268 acres, to homesteading
which began six years later in 1916.
The Reservation
Allotment Act of 1887 was finally implemented on December 1, 1905 when
two-thirds of the estimated number of Colville Indians available on
that date, signed the McLaughlin Agreement that ceded the south half
of the Colville Indian Reservation for an 80-acre allotment to each
Indian. By 1914, 2,505 Colville Indians had been allotted 333,275 acres
of reservation lands.
A Presidential
Proclamation of May 3, 1916 opened the remaining 417,841 acres of unallotted
and unreserved reservation lands to settlement.
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Standing Left
to Right Chief Long Jim, Chief Charley Swimptkin, Chief Louie Timentwa.
Sitting Joe Louie, Unidentified Indian man
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